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Tuesday, February 06, 2007

What happens to the gods when cultures are merging or groups are breaking? (Like the Indo-Europeans who migrated in all directions so what in Europe is Jupiter in India is Dyaus the sky god. Are these god-figures still the same unique god?)

If a group of people would worship a god and the group splits, they start to name him in different ways, they add him different elements from the new cultures they meet. After that is that god the same for the two groups?

Or take this example:there was an ancient Mongolian sky god, Tangri. As the time passed, people there started to believe that Tangri is a group of gods, not one god. So they worshiped at some moment 99 different Tangris.

This is my question: what happened to that god? what is happening to any god when people forgets him or adds him characteristics of other foreign god? Or misunderstands what he is? does he still have any influence? Does he change in conformity to people's view?